Battle scars

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ZELIE Bullen, the Perth-raised horse trainer who helped Spielberg bring War Horse to life, has been through her own wars on the way to Hollywood.

DINNERTIME brings a little ritual in Zelie Bullen's household. She calls it grace. But her grace is not dusty old words. It's chatty and simple. It's just about gratitude. Her grace might be about the opportunities the day has brought, the weather, the meal or even the day's swimming lesson. The Bullen family isn't religious. They don't even think themselves spiritual. They just know when life is good.

"I think we may be the only non-religious people in the world who say grace. And, at the end of it, we all say 'Amen'," says Bullen, laughing at the strangeness of it all.

Bullen's life wasn't always so shiny and bright. Life wasn't always the loving husband, the sweet brown-eyed boy, the gorgeous home and towering career. For a long time, her life was dark and difficult. Death became her unwelcome, almost constant, companion. There were days when the girl from Darlington in the Perth Hills couldn't move for grief. When you listen to her story, you begin to understand the whole grace thing.

Bullen is folded into a wicker chair on a wide veranda licked by a welcome, cool breeze, her muscular nut-brown arms wrapped around bare legs. Strong. Healthy. Happy.

On Boxing Day, she'll fold herself into another chair in a cinema to catch a film called War Horse, an epic set in World War I made by Steven Spielberg. She will watch it in the knowledge that the movie's magic rests not on the shoulders of Spielberg's Hollywood genius alone, but also on hers and those of her husband, Craig.

And, no doubt, she will again feel grateful.

Bullen is a stuntwoman, trick horserider and animal trainer. And based on a four-page list of TV, film and show credits, a pretty good one.

She trains animals big and small, in situations normal and not-so normal. War Horse was clearly not so normal. For that reason it may rate as her greatest triumph - a big-budget movie produced and directed by Hollywood's high prince, with a clutch of top-notch trainers and working with nine strange horses that she had to convince to run through explosions, extras, tanks, flashes and night-time gunfights.

In between it all, Spielberg would calmly instruct her to make the horses look this way and that, look happy, excited or affectionate. She's had easier jobs. She and Craig only learnt it was a Spielberg movie a day before they flew to England to shoot it.

"He's a very quiet man, a genius, no doubt about it, and very pleasant," she says. "But when things aren't going well he certainly lets people know pretty quickly."

Yet on her last day on set, the master reserved a special farewell for Bullen.

This was his first movie with a live animal in the lead role and pivotal to its success was portraying that special bond between horse and human. She must have nailed it.

"He ran out, threw his arms out and I gave him a hug. He held me by the shoulders and looked into my face and said, 'All the love that you've put into these animals has come out on screen. It's on my screen and it will be there forever'," she recounts. "I nearly started to cry. Then he said, 'We'll see you again'."

The words were gold to Bullen, who devotes so much time to her horses, to work out their heads and their foibles, and showers them with love.

When she was bullied as a kid at school, she would find solace in her horses. She loves animals because they are constant, real and present. Animals don't lie.

"I love being with animals because what you see is what you get. People are so much more complicated than that. An animal won't look you in the eye and say, 'I promise you I won't die'. I've had people do that . . . and then die."

On a wall in the Bullens' home in the Gold Coast hinterland is a small hanging with one of those tired maxims for life: "Life is a journey, not a destination". The quote assumes that the journey is there to be enjoyed, not endured. It's hard to imagine it when you see her today, but so much of Zelie Bullen's journey has had to be endured. It became so dark and painful, she almost gave up on the journey altogether.

When Bullen was 19, her sister, Julie, was killed in a car accident in Cairns by a drink-driver. Born only 18 months apart, she and Julie were extremely close.

"She and her boyfriend had left Perth and were travelling around Australia," Bullen says. "She died just two weeks before her 21st birthday. She was going to come back home to celebrate."

The death sent Bullen and her family reeling. If one can ever find anything like a silver lining in a tragedy on that scale, it was that Julie's death brought their estranged father back into Bullen's life. Bullen was only nine months old ("we think") when he walked out, leaving their mother to care for three girls under five in Darlington.

It was tough going but there were good times, too. "I'd ride my pony to the Beenong alternative school in Darlington and tether him while I was in class," Bullen says. "I'd give pony rides after school and go home with about 50 cents."

After school she went to Muresk Agricultural College and with her diploma she was accepted into Murdoch University with the aim of becoming a vet.

"But I came to the conclusion that I needed the freedom of the country - city life wasn't for me," she says. "I just wanted to do what I wanted to do, which is play with animals. I didn't know if I could ever even make any money at it."

Her decision to quit university coincided with the news that her father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, so she ended up spending several months with her father in Sydney leading up to his death, which came only a couple of years after Julie's.

When Bullen saw an advertisement for the Gold Coast's recently opened Movie World featuring a majestic, rearing palomino horse, she was off. The horse was a fitting talisman for her new life - she got a job at Movie World, which was the hothouse for a whole new, glorious path as a stuntwoman, trick rider and animal trainer.

The horse also led her to Graham O'Connell, a "gorgeous" performer in the Police Academy stunt show with whom Bullen fell in love, planned to marry and have babies with - "because that's what you do". The universe had other plans.

In mid-1994, while partying with friends in a Surfers Paradise apartment, Graham fell to his death from a 13th-floor balcony.

Perhaps it was the hopes and dreams she'd had for a life with Graham or the cumulative effect of rolling tragedies, but this time Bullen went into a deep, dark hole. Looking back, she talks about things getting "a bit funky", "fairly rough" or "pretty yucky".

"Oh yeah, I was going to kill myself for sure," she freely admits. "I was definitely on that road and I don't say that lightly . . . I didn't eat,

I became very depressed. Things weren't working, I was very unhappy, very untrusting, very scared to get close to anyone, untrusting of the world. I felt like death was following me."

Friend Mark Eady says after the Graham's accident, Bullen stopped eating and began wasting away. "I was shocked when I saw her," Eady says. "She was always so athletic and strong but her muscles had just fallen off her. It was like skin on a skeleton."

Bullen vowed never to love again and certainly never to have children. If this was the pain from losing a sister, a father and a lover, the pain of losing a child on top of it all would surely be insufferable.

But Bullen says: "There was much, much more."

Eady confirms she suffered even more sadness and further tragedies, which Bullen rarely talks about. She's prepared to recount at least one episode.

When she was at her lowest, a friend from WA, Jean, came over to nurse her through to the other side. By the time Bullen had recovered, Jean decided to stay in Queensland, but she, too, was grappling with her own issues. Within a year, the "funky things" going on in Jean's life crashed over her. The woman who came to be the pillar for a vulnerable friend took her own life.

"She had moved over to be with me, to help me, and then she killed herself. I was so angry at her and yet so understanding because I had been in that place, too. But I thought, 'You know I had been in that place but you also know I had come out the other side'."

Ask Bullen how she came out the other side, and she talks only in vague, almost flippant, strains about "letting go", about not fretting about the future and doing only things that made her happy. There is no manufactured hype about her recipe for recovery. It's about choices, paring life back to its bones and a refusal to ponder the future.

"I found the less I cared about what was happening next, the easier life became," she says. "I do think you get what you think about, for sure, and since this time in my life when I went down, down, down, then started being happy, I thought there's a lot to be said for the more you worry, the more you fret, the worse it gets."

Friends say it's probably more about her remarkable strength of character - a determination and survival instinct, perhaps born of the unpredictability of Bullen's childhood.

While Bullen was stubbornly ignoring the future and refusing to love or be loved, fate again crept up on her.

On a film set she spied animal trainer Craig Bullen, of Bullens' circuses and safari parks fame. He was, she says, "very cute". Her head was forced to surrender to her heart.

Craig strikes you as the yin to Bullen's yang, a laconic, slow-talking country type with a soft manner and easy vibe, the foil for his more, well, excitable wife.

She married Craig in 2005 and in 2006 gave birth to a beautiful, brown-eyed boy, Colt - yes, named in honour of horses. She stresses to him the importance of happiness, and as you'd expect arms him against the possibility of tragedy and sadness.

"I think just being happy is the most important goal in my life, and Craig and Colt bring so much love to my life," she says. "This bubble of happiness is what it's all about, and I raise Colt telling him that he needs to do what makes him happy. But I also talk to him about his emotional response to loss."

Hollywood director Lloyd Phillips has worked with Bullen on two films and says she has a gift with animals. She truly loves them, he says. But he's even more in awe of her personal qualities.

"How could you have such a wonderful view of life when you've been through all that?" he says. "But I think she was always a survivor and another dozen tragedies could have hit her and she would still be the same, which puts her into that special category of leaders."

Bullen says after the ABC's Australian Story episode on her life, she was flooded with messages of support, people who drew inspiration from her story. There were also messages from those who had suffered their own tragedies. She began to recognise the potency of her story.

"One man wrote me a letter telling me his family had been killed in a car accident and he didn't know how he would get through the day," she says. "Then he switched the TV on and saw my story and told me he was ready to live again.

"I don't want to be famous or be on a pedestal, but if I can help one person by doing these interviews then I will do them."

Her sister Freda, who at 45 is going through the dark issues Bullen went through in her 20s, was also moved by the show.

"We are close as sisters, but Freda's reaction took me by surprise," Bullen says. "She's proud of me for doing what I've done with my life and I'm proud of her. Now her boys are growing up, she is going to write down this story."

Bullen believes some of her strength comes from those she's lost. "But I reckon I might be the only person with a reasonable amount of death in my life who has never been to a clairvoyant. There's never been a point in my life where I've felt one person can help me get closer to people who have died," she says.

Consulting a clairvoyant, you see, would interfere with Bullen's fatalistic, live-in-the-moment mantra. "That's how I live. I try to enjoy the present and not worry too much about what's coming next because every time I have worried about that, kabam, something goes wrong."

And as the evening sun sighs on the brow of a hill in the stunning valley setting of their farm, Bullen farewells me with one message.

"Hey, and try not to worry so much. You just can't worry about the future."